1998 Earnhardt finally wins

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The Daytona 500 in 2004 was long over but the celebrating was not. Someone handed Dale Earnhardt Jr. a cell phone, and from what he said, it was clear whomever he was talking to was showering him with hosannas for his dominating win that afternoon.

Reporters overheard the conversation from Junior’s end: “Yeah, it was the most exciting ride of my life. Yes, sir, I was glad to see you today. Thank you very much. Take it easy, man.”

A NASCAR official chimed in once the call ended: Junior was talking to the president of the United States. The leader of the free world doesn’t call when you win just any race. But when you win the biggest race in the country, you get to tell the commander in chief to, “take it easy.”

Taking the checkered flag in the Daytona 500 validates greatness, and it brings the marginal to center stage … and leaves them there forever. Nobody would care that Trevor Bayne can’t find a full-time ride except that he won the 2011 Daytona 500.

Have a career donut in the The Great American Race, and your resume, no matter how sterling, has a blank spot. That’s why it was such a big deal when Dale Earnhardt finally won his one and only Daytona 500 in 1998, even though he had seven championships and had won nearly three dozen races at Daytona International Speedway.

It’s why Tony Stewart, who has three Cup championships and an IRL championship and is widely considered one of the most talented drivers in the history of American motorsports, so badly wants to win one. It’s why he’s so frustrated when he comes up short. Until he wins, he’ll never take it easy.

In life, Dale Earnhardt loomed over NASCAR, a daring, black-clad champion who wheeled himself from humble beginnings to the top of the sport. Twelve years after death, his presence remains undeniable.

In the years after Earnhardt died on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, NASCAR changed many things that played a part in his death, from the wall he ran into, to the way the car absorbs energy, to the harness that held him in place, to the helmet on his head.

All of those changes made the sport safer.

His death changed the sport in the public’s image, too. The massive outpouring of grief brought more attention to NASCAR than any other event in its history. Most of that attention faded over time but the spotlight changed the way the public thinks about NASCAR and the way the sport thinks about itself.

Earnhardt’s legacy is secure. If he’s not the greatest driver in history, he’s in the top three. His seven Cup championships are tied for the most ever. He was in the first class when NASCAR opened its Hall of Fame. He is widely credited for helping to create the massive and ongoing explosion in merchandising that has made countless drivers after him massively wealthy.

More important than all of that: Thanks in large part to the safety changes that followed his death, nobody has died in a NASCAR race since.

His death in the 2001 Daytona 500 overshadowed the win by Michael Waltrip, who scored his first career victory in Earnhardt’s car. Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt Jr. finished 1-2 in Dale Earnhardt Inc. cars.

This was the first 500-mile race televised live in the United States from the green flag to the checkered flag. The race coincided with a huge snowstorm in the Northeast, so a captive audience tuned in to check out those crazy Southerners going fast and turning left.

And what a show they put on.

On the last lap, Donnie Allison was leading, with Cale Yarborough chasing him. The two cars bumped several times, and then careened into the wall before coming to a rest in the infield. Richard Petty, who has half a lap behind them, drove on to win. It was the easiest last-lap pass ever.

Bobby Allison, Donnie’s brother, stopped to see if Donnie needed a ride back to the garage. Yarborough yelled at him, saying the wreck was his fault. Bobby yelled back. “I think I questioned his ancestry, which I shouldn’t have done. That didn’t settle him down any,” Bobby Allison told Sporting News a few years ago.

The two Allisons and Yarborough fought in the infield. “Cale went to beating on my fist with his nose,” Bobby Allison said. “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

When the NASCAR season starts, every driver has three goals, in this order: 1. Win the Cup championship; 2. win the Daytona 500; 3. win any other race.

When the 1998 season started, Dale Earnhardt had checked No. 1 off seven times (tied for the most ever) and No. 3 70 times (fifth most at the time). But in 19 tries he had never won NASCAR’s biggest race.

This was more statistical oddity and comically bad luck than indicative of Earnhardt’s talent in a restrictor-place race on Daytona’s high grooves. He had won nearly three dozen races there, just never the biggest.

When Earnhardt finally won, the celebration that followed was unique in NASCAR history. Opposing crew members and NASCAR officials lined pit road as The Intimidator drove by, hoping to shake his hand. Broadcasting the race live on CBS, Mike Joy called it “the world’s longest receiving line,” and nobody has improved upon that description since.

Here’s a dirty little secret about the Daytona 500 (and every other NASCAR race, for that matter): The fastest car doesn’t always win. The car that wins combines speed with luck. And so it was as the laps wound down in the 2004 Daytona 500.

Dale Earnhardt Jr., driving the Dale Earnhardt Inc. No 8, the fastest car in the race, figured he’d find a way to lose.

“I remember the last 20 laps, leading the race and wondering if the caution was going to come out and change the whole complexity of the race, whether the car was going to have a problem,” he says. “Anything could happen. I was just wondering what that might be.”

When that something turned out to be nothing — when nobody wrecked, when nothing broke, when Tony Stewart stayed squarely in his rearview mirror — the race was Junior’s. It took his dad 20 tries to win the Daytona 500. It took him five, driving for the team that bore his dad’s name.

“Then we came to the white flag, and I just knew at that moment that everything on the car was fine and that we were going to win the race,” Earnhardt says. “I remember crossing the finish line and coming back around celebrating with the crew right there at the start/finish line.
“… It was just incredible going into victory lane and finally seeing the team and everybody was in disbelief and the excitement of how all that was going down and what was happening to us at that very moment.”

Trevor Bayne, the nobodiest of all the nobodys to ever win a NASCAR race, battled the best drivers in NASCAR for 500 miles and he beat them all, and all of a sudden a bright future unfurled before him. All he had to do was get there and seize it, like he had just seized the biggest race in the country.

His first stop was victory lane, and that posed a problem: He didn’t know where it was.

How could he? It’s not like he’d been there before, at Daytona or any other big-time track. His lone win in a NASCAR-sanctioned event came in a series and track even more unknown than he was. He was 20 years and one day old, the youngest to ever win the Daytona 500 by five years, and this was just his second Sprint Cup race ever.

He shouted over his radio for directions, and he got them from an unimpeachable source: his iconic Wood Brothers Racing team, which had been there before, but not since 1976, 15 years and four days before Bayne was born.

Bayne wasn’t the only one in search of his own celebration party. Some members of the Wood family left early in the race, driving from Daytona Beach into Georgia on the way to Virginia before turning around and coming back when it looked like Bayne had a chance to win. When they arrived at the track, long after the race had ended but still early in the party, they stopped in the media center to ask where the celebration was because they couldn’t wait to join it.

If you asked Richard Petty who was the better pure driver, him or David Pearson, he’d say Pearson. If you asked Pearson, he’d agree.

With 200 wins, Petty is the all-time leader. Pearson is second with 105. For two decades they were the sport’s two best drivers, and of all the 550 times they raced against each other, none can top this finish.

Petty led at the white flag, Pearson passed him on the backstretch and Petty tried to pass Pearson back coming out of Turn 4. They touched as Petty pulled in front of Pearson. The contact sent them spinning into the infield just a few hundred yards from the finish line. No other driver was close enough to pass them, so whoever got his car pointed in the right direction and moving again would win.

As Petty tried unsuccessfully to re-fire his engine, Pearson drove his battered car past him for the win.

In 1989, a Cup car’s fuel cell sat inside a steel tank. It held roughly 22 gallons of gas, which Darrell Waltrip wanted to stretch for the final 56 laps (140 miles) in pursuit of his first Daytona 500 victory after coming up short 17 times. Back then, that was a long way to go on one tank of gas.

A long way, but not impossible.

The draft makes saving fuel easier, and Waltrip had a big enough lead that he could run less than full throttle, which saved more. He had nothing to lose. Winning is all that matters in the Daytona 500 and if he made the gas last long enough, he would win. If he stopped for gas, he wouldn’t. So he went for it.

There wasn’t a whole lot of confidence that he could make it, either in the cockpit, where every noise sounded to Waltrip like the car stalling, or in the owner’s box, where Rick Hendrick watched impatiently. As Waltrip turned lap after lap, he imagined the 22-gallon fuel cell inside the 22-gage steel tank running dry. Over the radio, he said as much.

That did nothing to calm Hendrick. “I remember standing up and my knees were weak, because, I thought, ‘Man, we’re so close. But he’s going to run out of gas,’” Hendrick said. “But you’ve got to wait 10 laps. And you know what it meant to him, and you know what it meant to the organization. You’re, just, man, let it happen.”

It did. And the celebration afterward was joyous. Talking in victory lane to Mike Joy, who is now his broadcasting partner on Fox, Waltrip was in disbelief.

“I won the Daytona 500! I won the Daytona 500! Wait, wait, this is the Daytona 500, isn’t it? Don’t tell me it isn’t.”

Then he did the Ickey Shuffle and slammed his helmet to the ground in delight.

Hold out your arm. From your shoulder to the tip of your middle finger, that’s about how far Kevin Harvick’s car was relative to Mark Martin’s as they crossed the finish line in the 2007 Daytona 500.

Hold out your arm again. From your shoulder to the tip of your middle finger, multiply it by a billion, and that’s how much most NASCAR fans, drivers and officials would have liked to see Martin win by. That’s not a knock against Harvick as much as affirmation of how widely respected Martin is across the sport.

For two and three-quarters of the final two and a half miles, it looked like Martin would win the biggest race of them all. At Daytona, NASCAR records the positions of drivers at 18 locations on the track. On the last lap, Martin led at 14 of them. But only one matters, and he wasn’t leading at that one.

Martin wouldn’t complain. After the race, he said nobody wanted to see a grown man cry. Which is not to say he didn’t want to. He was trying to keep his disappointment at arm’s length.

NASCAR founder Big Bill France had one hard-and-fast rule about post-race controversies: Never change the winner. He wanted fans to go home knowing who won the race, and he never wanted fans to see a different name in the paper later on. Especially when it came to cheating controversies, he resisted taking away trophies and wins, opting instead for points penalties and fines.

But the finish in the first Daytona 500 was so close that officials couldn’t figure out who won before race fans left for home. Instant replay didn’t exist yet, so NASCAR officials needed time to sort through the evidence. Unofficial results gave the race to Johnny Beauchamp, but Lee Petty insisted he had won.

France reviewed newsreel and photographic evidence, and three days later gave the race to Petty.

The reason Dale Earnhardt’s win in the 1998 race ranks so high on Daytona 500 lists is because things like this happened to him: In 1990, he led 155 laps, at times building a massive lead uncommon in the modern era at Daytona (or anywhere else.) Even after a caution bunched up the cars near the end, Earnhardt drove to the lead and appeared to have the win in hand.

Entering Turn 3 for the final time, with Derrike Cope — who had never had a top-five finish in 71 career starts — behind him, Earnhardt suddenly slowed and pulled up toward the wall and out of the racing groove. Cope didn’t have to brake or swerve, he just simply drove by.

Later it was determined that Earnhardt ran over debris, which shredded his right rear tire, and along with it The Intimidator’s hopes for his first Haley J. Earl trophy.

More than any other sport, NASCAR is built on father-son relationships. Few drivers make it to the top levels of NASCAR without a father who either bankrolls his rise through the low levels of racing or teaches him to race or both.

The Pettys, Earnhardts, Allisons and Pearsons and more all featured multi-generational drivers.

One moment crystallized all of that: Ned Jarrett broadcasting his son Dale’s win in the 1993 Daytona 500 over Dale Earnhardt.

The race was on CBS Sports, and Jarrett — a two-time Cup champion who is now a member of the NASCAR Hall of Fame — called the final half lap:

“Come on, Dale. Go, baby, go. All right, come on. I know he’s got it to the floorboard. He can’t do anymore. Come on. Take her to the inside. Don’t let him get on the inside of you coming around this turn. Here he comes, Earnhardt. It’s the ‘Dale and Dale Show,’ as we come off Turn 4. You know who I’m pulling for, it’s Dale Jarrett. Bring her to the inside, Dale. Don’t let him get down there. He’s going to make it! Dale Jarrett’s going to win the Daytona 500!”

As the 1997 season started, Jeff Gordon was in the midst of becoming the superstar he is now. He had already won one championship and come close to another. On this day, he won his first Daytona 500, the first of 10 wins that season en route to his second championship, which he followed up the next year with 13 more wins and his third championship.

“The key moment was getting the lead in the closing laps,” Gordon says. “As a group our three drivers teamed up together to make that pass on Bill (Elliott), and ultimately it got the win for me and even got the 1-2-3 (finish for Hendrick Motorsports),” Gordon said.

Gordon had teammates Terry Labonte and Ricky Craven behind him, which not only helped him make the pass but guaranteed he would stay out front, at least for the time being. And here’s why getting the lead was so important: The race was set up for an interesting and potentially controversial finish — would his teammates battle for the win or be content to finish 1-2-3?

Thinking out loud about his, Gordon said if he were in second or third, he probably would have tried to win. A crash behind them with a few laps remaining made the question irrelevant. Gordon won under caution.

The driver of the second-place car peeked his nose down low in turns 3 and 4 on the last lap of the Daytona 500 in an attempt to make a pass for the lead. But the driver of the first-place car was too fast, so the driver of the second-place car got back in line.

This happens in almost every Daytona 500. But in 1988 it was different: the driver of the first place car, Bobby Allison, was the father of the driver of the second-place car, Davey Allison.

This was an impossibly great day for the Allison family that is soaked through with impossible sadness. Bobby suffered head injuries later that season that were so severe that he has no memory of finishing 1-2 with his son in the biggest win of his life. Davey died in a helicopter crash at Talladega five years later, 11 months after his brother, Clifford died in a crash during practice at Michigan.

Of all the ways for a driver to lose the Daytona 500, getting penalized for trying to work on his car on the track while the race was under a red flag stands alone.
There’s no guarantee Sterling Marlin would have won the 2002 Daytona 500 without the penalty. He had the strongest car but that guarantees nothing, especially at Daytona. But his actions as the cars sat in silence with three laps left removed any possibility he would take the checkered flag. He unhooked his belts, jumped out of the car, ran to the front passenger side and tried to pull out a dented-in fender.

While it’s doubtful Marlin was strong enough to move the sheet metal enough to make any difference anyway, NASCAR rules are clear (on this point, at least): A team cannot work on the car under red flag conditions. Marlin was forced to drop from first to 12th and ended the race in eighth.

Speaking for everyone who saw it, the late Jim Hunter, NASCAR vice president, told reporters: “The sight of him getting out the car and running around the other side was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen."

The most important driving innovation in NASCAR history came about by accident. In the 1960 Daytona 500, Junior Johnson was so slow he knew he had no chance to win. He was turning laps to get the best finish he could when Cotton Owens blew past him.

“I just dropped in behind him,” Johnson told Sporting News on the 50th anniversary of his discovery of the draft. “In half a lap, I was keeping up with him. In fact, I was running right on his bumper and letting off the gas a little bit.”

At first Johnson thought crew chief Ray Fox had fixed his car. But when he drove by himself again, he remained 15 to 20 mph off the pace. For the rest of the race, Johnson — a member of NASCAR’s first Hall of Fame class — kept up with his faster peers by snuggling up behind them.

There were so many wrecks and blown engines that Johnson ended up winning. Racing at Daytona has never been the same since.